1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the management of virtual machines. More specifically, the present invention relates to the configuration of network ports that are used by virtual machines.
2. Background of the Related Art
In a cloud computing environment, a user is assigned a virtual machine, sometimes also referred to as a virtual server, somewhere in the computing cloud. The virtual machine provides the software operating system and has access to physical resources, such as input/output bandwidth, processing power and memory capacity, to support the user's application. Provisioning software manages and allocates virtual machines among the available computer nodes in the cloud. Because each virtual machine runs independent of other virtual machines, multiple operating system environments can co-exist on the same physical computer in complete isolation from each other.
Each virtual machine runs on a hypervisor and typically needs the ability to communicate with other virtual machines and/or communicate over a network. A virtual switch is implemented in the hypervisor and provides the virtual machine with communication to a physical switch. However, virtual machines are created and destroyed more often than physical servers, and virtual machines may be moved from one hypervisor to another hypervisor to improve performance and resource utilization. Therefore, it is usually necessary to manually modify the network configuration when a virtual machine is created, destroyed, or moved/migrated. Specifically, providing network connectivity for a newly created or migrated virtual machine requires the hosting computer system or node to provide a network adapter that will provide the virtual machine with network access.